All the labels that can be slapped on the perfectly titled movie genre “the weeper” fit If I Stay: manipulative, contrived, melodramatic.

Teenage girls and the boys who want to date them need to discover the pleasures of a well-executed teen weeper for themselves, and this film fills the bill.

Chloe Grace Moretz takes on her first star-vehicle romance in the adaptation of the Gayle Forman novel.

Moretz is Mia, a high-school cello prodigy from Portland, Ore., who, 12 minutes into the movie, is in a car crash. Her spirit awakens in the crimson snow to see her broken body hauled off in an ambulance.

As the doctors operate on her, somebody says, “If she wants to live, she’d better start fighting.” That is what the movie is about — Mia’s spirit, dashing barefoot through the halls of the hospital and reliving, through flashbacks, the life she might leave behind.

We travel back to when she met Adam (Jamie Blackley), the hunky upperclassman alt rocker who is drawn to her good looks and her immersion in music.

Worlds collide as the Beethoven-loving cellist struggles to fit in with Portland’s two-guitar bar-band scene.

In other scenes, we fall in with her hip parents. Dad (Joshua Leonard) used to be a punk drummer, and mom (Mireille Enos) was a groupie. Then they had their second child (Jakob Davies) and gave up the rock scene for straight jobs.

“Sometimes you make choices in life,” is Mom’s wise counsel, “and sometimes choices make you.”

Adam gives Mia her first kiss and her first shot of whiskey — and is her “first” in that other all-important way. But she could get into the Juilliard School in New York, and that first love could be the one who got away.

Or she could never come out of the coma she is in, the one we see her in every time we return to the hospital, where Adam is almost the only one not allowed to see Mia.

Director R.J. Cutler, a veteran TV producer-director (Nashville), keeps the camera in tight on Moretz, and the romance sinks or swims on her performance. Her cello playing is impressive (occasionally sped up to reach the proper tempo); her girl-in-love moments are awkward, in a studious way.

Whatever disconnects the movie throws at us, it eventually gets down to business: Mia’s choice. Does she stay or let go?

Take away the teen drinking, profanity and (off-camera) sex, and If I Stay is almost a faith-based film. Apparently, the only people who die go by choice in Forman’s fiction.

Wonderful supporting players give the movie its heart. Stacy Keach, playing the grandfather, has a couple of great scenes with Mia. Aisha Hinds is a compassionate nurse who whispers in the comatose teen’s ear.

Manipulated we may be, but If I Stay will make you wish you had brought a hankie.